Palantir CEO calls closed AI firms 'bourgeois,' blasts OpenAI and Anthropic

Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp unleashed a broadside against OpenAI, Anthropic and other major AI companies, comparing them to the bourgeoisie, as the US data analytics firm reported its second-quarter earnings.

In a shareholder letter released Monday, Karp said the strong second-quarter results reflected a broader shift. "The revolution for independence and AI sovereignty is now fully underway," he said, adding that Palantir's customers had refused to become "vassal states of the language models." The remarks were widely read as an attack on OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and other companies developing closed AI models built on large language models (LLMs).

"These models have grown and evolved by absorbing virtually every piece of written material our civilization has ever produced," Karp said. "And now those models, and those who built them, are targeting industries across the globe."

His argument was that leading AI model providers charge customers per token — the basic unit of AI computation — for services trained on internet data and books, then use data generated by those customers to further train their models, effectively appropriating the intellectual property of countless users. He said companies and institutions that had previously relied on these AI models were increasingly recognizing the risks of ceding operational control to AI or leaving AI models unchecked within their organizations.

Karp drew explicitly on Marxist terminology, likening AI model developers to the bourgeoisie — the propertied class — and ordinary businesses to the proletariat.

He said LLM developers were "intentionally or unintentionally seeking to seize the means of production of their self-described partners," and that "the limitations and flaws of the token-industrial complex, which has threatened to dominate the global economy, are becoming ever more apparent."

Karp said Palantir, unlike those AI developers, does not form "parasitic relationships" with its clients. "We are not compensated for clicks, tokens or chats," he said. "It is inappropriate to gamify the most important development in modern economic history."

Karp had also lashed out at closed AI companies in media interviews last month, accusing them of irresponsibly overselling their models. Palantir also joined an open letter by technology companies opposing regulation of open-source AI late last month.

In a separate interview with US financial broadcaster CNBC that day, Karp addressed the challenge posed by Chinese open-source models. "We need to compete to win, and American open models need to be as good as Chinese models," he said.

On the controversy over Chinese companies allegedly copying closed US AI models through so-called "distillation," Karp said those closed models were themselves "distilled from all the IP in the world, including corporate data."